Is pitch accent necessary for comprehension by native Japanese speakers? – An ERP investigation

• Published in: Journal of neurolinguistics Vol. 27; no. 1; pp. 31 - 40
• Main Authors: Tamaoka, Katsuo, Saito, Nobuhiro, Kiyama, Sachiko, Timmer, Kalinka, Verdonschot, Rinus G.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.01.2014
• Subjects: Accentual opposition; ERP; Homophone; Japanese; N400; Pitch accent; Pitch accent; ERP; N400; Homophone; Accentual opposition; Japanese
• ISSN: 0911-6044; 1873-8052
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jneuroling.2013.08.001

Not unlike the tonal system in Chinese, Japanese habitually attaches pitch accents to the production of words. However, in contrast to Chinese, few homophonic word-pairs are really distinguished by pitch accents (Shibata & Shibata, 1990). This predicts that pitch accent plays a small role in lexical selection for Japanese language comprehension. The present study investigated whether native Japanese speakers necessarily use pitch accent in the processing of accent-contrasted homophonic pairs (e.g., ame [LH] for ‘candy’ and ame [HL] for ‘rain’) measuring electroencephalographic (EEG) potentials. Electrophysiological evidence (i.e., N400) was obtained when a word was semantically incorrect for a given context but not for incorrectly accented homophones. This suggests that pitch accent indeed plays a minor role when understanding Japanese. •This paper provides the first ERP evidence showing a minor role for pitch accent when processing Japanese sentences.•An N400 was obtained when a word was semantically incorrect for a given context but not for incorrectly accented homophones.•Pitch accent itself may not be an essential factor during language comprehension.